The best known is the theorizing of the subject in film studies. First.film theory objectified viewers as subjects imprisoned in themselves. following Baudrillard. dialectics (the hermeneutic circle) and the expert who understands the meanings to be uncovered. by reducing humans to the products (traces) of historical processes. Reifying an imaginary non-Western subject.The subject of ‘the subject’
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Why worry about the subject in media studies? Why not just get on with our substantive analyses instead of wasting time on philosophical nit picking? The short answer is that ignoring assumptions we make about the subject reiterates Eurocentric forms of closure and hegemony. and asks only what mind has done on certain definite occasions (1942: 61). The issue of the subject turns up under all sorts of labels. and so the intention behind production – or should it be.1 You will note that this entire argument works without reference to
1
Such a study of mind involves two renunciations. They need interpreting. sometimes dangerous (Mulvey 1992) of participation. I prefer this last. This was achieved by invoking a hyperacademicized psychoanalysis. Foucault 1982). media imperialism. Media studies depends upon projection (note the pun) accounts of producers veering between international conspiracy and cock-up theories. following Heidegger). This ranges from the unconscious processes imputed in film theory to how viewers more or less deliberately engage with characters. we can locate producers. treated and divided historically and culturally into subjects or objects of different kinds (cf. which runs into loony relativism or sheer incoherence (translation becomes impossible. runs into different difficulties. heterogeneous and transformative. readers/viewers and reception within it. allegiance. The subject becomes constitutive of production and consumption as ways of articulating analytical objects out of the complex of social action. the issues become so complex that the urge to simplify radically becomes irresistible. while readers or viewers are imagined as anything from instantiations of the liberal dream to passive complicit dupes. feel. are other issues. production. of course. and so the debates about advertising. These include the issue of personal or cultural identity. it renounces all attempt to discover what mind always and everywhere does. with all its restrictions. so giving rise to the entire paraphernalia of readings. violence. Secondly. whether by implication-extrication (Fiske 1989) or by degrees of sympathy (recognition. it asks only what mind does. alignment. stripped of any sense of history. ‘seduction’ (1990)? Texts presuppose authorial subjects (or projects. as well as theories of production and consumption (which shows how bourgeois analyses are). How media work. Smith 1995: 81-86). The result inevitably was further to elevate the knowing subject of the expert over the objects of inquiry -. and indeed changing under inquiry (Collingwood 1946: 84-85).. The counter-arguments that stress subjects as historically constituted. codes. and the whole problem of identification.. You can have your cake and eat it too by holding that mind is "pure act". Once we ask as well how have humans been imagined. and more serious. it renounces with Locke all ‘science of substance’. does just the same. the media presuppose a theory of pleasure. More generally.. If we can produce an account of how all subjects think. culture or practice.
. how can you tell what is a human? Or they treat the subject as partly beyond knowability. all make massive – and usually incommensurable – assumptions about the subject. These include the nature of the ‘text’. Either they slide into constructivism.. It does not ask what mind is. Less obvious. imagine.

Problematically. but a project’ (Ricoeur 1981: 202). Because the latter ‘relies on the recognition of what a foreign subject means or intends on the basis of all kinds of signs in which psychic life expresses itself’ (1981: 197). but become powers of ‘mediating between one reality and another’ (Baudrillard 1983a: 102) or. Understanding and interpretation directly raise the issue of the subject. Clifford Geertz neatly sums up the alternative. who has posed the interpretation’ (1990: 66). Ricoeur attempted to finesse the problem by distinguishing (following Dilthey) interpreting inscribed signs (Auslegung) from Verstehen (understanding.
so that the question what mind is resolves itself without residue into the question what mind does. Reversing the argument – treating the subject as ancillary to the lifework of becoming – makes the media central because they cease to be nebulous processes. does not. get round the problem that ‘one does not interpret what there is in the signified.The subject of ‘the subject’
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the issue of subjectivity. what I know of you depends fundamentally on me. Habermas 1987). Interpretation Conventionally understanding and knowledge rest upon the presupposition that there are human subjects who do the understanding and knowing. ‘What is man?’ (Buber 1992: 30-31). That is. fundamentally. as Foucault noted. the raison d’être of the human sciences. More radically.
Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego-effacement and fellow feeling (1983: 70). but whether this is defensible I shall not ask (Collingwood 1942: 61). This line of argument leads to the anti-subjectism of (post)structuralism. at least to tiptoe round it elegantly. cf. comprehension). but one interprets. The great philosophical questions (What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope?) according to Kant relate to the final question. There have been various ways. practices of transforming agents. which emerges as an addendum to the being of the subject. Intersubjectivity What then is the problem of the knowing subject? Dilthey puts it succinctly.
. We are caught in the superiority of the Euro-American knowing subject. the subject is constitutive of understanding. if not to address the vicious circle. Attempts to displace the problem of the subject onto the problem of the text. you can argue that ‘what we understand first in a discourse is not another person. patients and the world. this neither requires speaking the language nor being there. The result arguably is a vicious circle (Foucault 1970. as I would prefer to put it. following Heidegger. Humans however are both who – or what – does the knowing or understanding and the object of such study.

cf. We are not going to be asking. is something we achieve.. The argument is circular..
The chief presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is. and all meaning for myself would issue from myself (Descombes 1980: 72.. How do we escape the circularity of intersubjectivity? What do the various noted authors on the subject say? The vital passage in Schutz reads as follows:
We must. in the world and dialogic in a strong sense. that the self be both unitary and similar to others (a vague formulation).
Humanity. in the definite. incomplete.
Schutz recognizes the important questions and cheerily bypasses them in favour of presuming a natural attitude. The former establishes experience. whether the concept ‘human being’ presupposes a transcendental ego in which the transcendental alter ego is already constituted. and through the other for oneself. therefore. aware that he is different.leave unsolved the notoriously difficult problems which surround the constitution of the Thou within the subjectivity of private experience. not are born into. It is always partial. Bakhtin 1986: 167-68). I become aware of him. how the Thou is constituted in an Ego.
Understanding presupposes consciousnesses be identical (or alike in all relevant respects). he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another (1984: 267). or beyond the grasp of. It is always mediated. essentially different from myself. There is nothing in ‘the mind-constructed world’ which is alien to. through it consciousness of a unitary self and a similarity with others.
Bakhtin put it better still. The theologian and anthropologist Martin Buber offers a subtler analysis in terms of relationality.. or our recognition of others. the latter relations. therefore. or how universally valid intersubjective knowledge is possible.. in other words exnomination. understanding. that humans have an identical nature as individuals and lastly that all these are linked. and I accept whom I thus see (Buber [1965 1992: 73). A person has no sovereign internal territory. identity of human nature and individuality are linked. then all meaning would issue from men.. They are: I-It and I-Thou. A basic experience. It is this. The object we shall be studying.The subject of ‘the subject’
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Mutual understanding assures us of what individuals have in common.permeates the whole conception of the mind-constructed world. he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself. is the human being who is looking at the world from within the natural attitude (1967: 98. historically changing. unique way which is peculiar to him. This is the presupposition for understanding (1976: 186)... not
.
To be means to be for another. Appreciation of another person is relational. if the subject-object dichotomy were correct. citing Merleau-Ponty 1973: 269). The mutuality of understanding confirms the presuppositions. In other words.

.
In communicative action we today proceed from those formal presuppositions of intersubjectivity that are necessary if we are to be able to refer to something in the one objective world.. From the Latin come the ideas of being under the dominion of a sovereign.
Subjectum translates the Greek hupokeimenon "that which lies under.. Identity is an openness to the world which emerges in relationship to another. or a world intersubjectively shared by members." "the substratum". In a classical context. his metaphysical other (1969: 33-40) is detached from mind as engagement with the world and with others. Validity claims.
Formally. The world being identical to all observers (note the familiar visualism) excludes the possibility of learning. a term which in refers in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics to that of which all other entities are predicated but which is itself not predicated of anything else.
. The subject at last Oddly Raymond Williams misses the conventional origin of argument about the subject.. and the subject to media. or the Same. Critchley 1996: 13)
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Levinas produces a similar-looking argument for the need to consider the self. First ‘truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with "the world". In most Western European languages.. We are offered pure content-free thought: that is thought about thought without an object. for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous’ (Goodman 1978: 17). with no consideration of the critical practices of the people concerned. and they do so in an abstract form freed of all specific content (1984: 50). However. of substance and matter worked upon (see Williams 1983). on my reading.[and has a function analogous to matter (hulñ. then. this is problematic. change. which makes media important to the subject.
Problems arise when academics treat such accounts as timeless truths. the subject is the subject of predication. The contrast of ‘subject’ with ‘object’ (with their reversal of meanings in English. It is also what anthropologists do when they are content to lay out categories of ‘the person’..that persists through the changes that form (morphñ) imposes upon it (Critchley 1996: 13).The subject of ‘the subject’
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salivating over cinema.. in terms of others (Autrui). This exemplifies Heidegger’s apophantical method.presuppose a world that is identical for all possible observers. nor even if they have any. the contemplation of words abstracted from practices. like so many prize trophies. rather than the reverse. words for ‘the subject’ have accreted a wide fan of connotations. instead of inquiring into the historical and social circumstances of their use.2 Depressingly as late as the 1980s Habermas was still peddling a formal version of intersubjectivity. television or the net..

strategy. it was a res cogitans. comes to command the known world and determine the conditions of its knowability. presence to self – which implies therefore a certain interpretation of temporality: identity to self. the world. what about shifting to how the subject is spoken about? Are there. following Hegel. a thinking thing or substance. the couple ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. as what constitutes and dominates all around it. intentionality. the imagination of a simulated body lacking in orifices.’ (1991: 109). it is ‘that which is capable of maintaining within itself its own contradiction’ (Nancy 1991: 6). and through its rationality it dominates those objects which it determines (Guzzoni 1996: 202. We also speak of logical. together with the history of their derivatives. and of knowability itself. grammatical and ethical subjects. consciousness. it would seem. civilized Europeans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The connotations give references to the subject a seeming luminous – I might say numinous – richness and colour that it is conveniently difficult to obviate. of Deleuze’s account of the subject as a desiring machine or a body without organs (Critchley 1996: 25). property.
What is less often remarked upon is how monstrous this subject is (reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s narrative God in the Old Testament). We now know that such an account was possible only within the circle of educated. peculiarly known to and identified with its philosophical authors. however. or metaphysical. personality. will. However. a being focused about intensities of eating in an entirely quantitative. ‘essential predicates’ which apply to all subjects? Despite their ostensible diversity. For Kant. for instance. that is ‘whatever it is that thinks in its capacity as thinking’ and so as ‘autonomously determining’. humanity. of Lacan’s decentring of the subject in his reading of Freud. even thinking about. of Althusser’s account of the transformation of individuals into subjects (subjectivity conceived as subjection) through the interpellation of ideology. If asking what the subject is proves too disturbing. Logically it is incapable of doing anything in or. the subject. The knowing subject of the human sciences had received the final jolt of lightning sufficient to jerk it into spasmodic existence in the Gothic castle of German Idealism. Finally. positionality. codeless and quantityless world (Deleuze 1990: 88). 203).
. and minimalist. it was the subject as ‘the ground of thought’. living as a surface or skin without hidden depths. Does the ‘postmodern’ subject reflect the late twentieth century? Did it produce it? (Or is the question caught on an old dichotomy of subject versus world?) These are
the grand and prophetic gestures of Foucault when he spoke of the erasure of man like a figure drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. What though is the philosophical. Derrida argued that
they are all ordered around being present (étant-present). freedom. or self-constituting. subject? For Descartes. Experientially – following Klein’s reduction of Freud’s subject to anxiety over loss (epitomized in the mother’s breast) – it becomes a generalized.The subject of ‘the subject’
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provide a further set. etc. of Derrida’s inscription of the subject within language and the formulation of language as diff‚rance of which the subject is an effect. ego.

. on Baudrillard’s account. choice.) ‘There is an important difference between what we ordinarily understand by the word subject and the meaning this word has finally taken in philosophy’ (Descombes 1991: 123). is the chief executioner of this circularity. According to this critique. but also the end of the medium. to an ahistorical. Balinese example. political or ethical. More usefully. to assert so is neither straightforward nor without significant implications. According to Descombes.. them but cannot easily question them. by posing itself.the effacement of terms and of distinct oppositions. However representation has a history.. Baudrillard. and thus that of the medium and the real (1983a: 102-3). for instance. scholars have invoked a metaphysical subject which differs from..
And with that. knowledge and desire (1988: 214). went the subject.. if notionally still the ground of. I must be agent of my actions.
.. culture as the play of the self-representing subject. or else reject.the subject as representation and representation as subject. (cf.it is by representing itself..
What we call the critique of subject is in fact the critique of the concept of the subject (or of the concept of subjectivity). drawing heavily upon Foucault.The subject of ‘the subject’
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This reads rather like a list of absolute presuppositions: you have to accept. In other words.. subjects as grammatical. we may ask how the subject represents itself.that the Cartesian ego establishes itself as the basis of all possible truth (1991: 64). that a thinker is the subject of his thoughts. that an agent is the subject of his action. it is an illusion – an illusion ascribable to a ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ – to believe that a lover is the subject of his desires. And
the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message. After the subject? It is less recourse to the subject to which its critics object. The central themes of the western philosophy of the subject included representation. As Borch-Jacobsen notes
the subject of the moderns is first and foremost the subject of representation.
This is the subject of culture as we understand it these days.. and so on (Descombes 1991: 120-21)
Commonsensical as it may seem that. deliberation. that a writer is the subject of his writing. but to the idea of subjectivity.. foundational subject as authority. In Europe it ended with the represented image becoming its own pure simulacrum (1983b).

. my parentheses. a thinking substance: it resembles and sticks to the machine.how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of ‘sexuality’ (1982: 208. It was this problem. transcendentally self-determining and eternal.. impersonal and ahistorical.three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.. Critics of the subject ‘find that the word subject is dangerous: this word. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences [e.or herself into a subject. anthropology. whether in its classical unitary. the "philosophies of consciousness" of the Cartesian tradition persist in seeking a being (whose ontological traits are those of the body). Lacan attempts ‘to overcome the reified. But the true (metaphysical) subject should be opposed to the human subject’.
In other words the complaint was that the distinction had not been drawn radically enough. Note that object(ification) and subject(ification) are not antinomies here).. The self emerges as an imaginary precipitate or. appears to authorize the transfer of certain attributes of the person to that which thinks in the person. It is the Lacanian revision of the subject as inherently split. Finally. Examples are the mad and the sane. but rather a protest against the tendency to confuse subjectivity (defined by methods of doubt. Under the name of subject.The subject of ‘the subject’
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the critique of the subject was not a critique of the philosophical subject.g.. of experience or postulation) with a person’s mental life. The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. then second. which Foucault seems to decided he was addressing... in our culture. I have sought to study. when he wrote that his objective had been
to create a history of the different modes by which.the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call ‘dividing practices’. to people who will henceforth be held responsible’ (1991: 131). more subtly still.. of presupposition.... as ‘nothing but the impossibility of its own signifying representation – the empty place opened up in the
.. because of its familiar non-philosophical use.the way a human being turns him. in the manner of a purely "performative" attribution.. ‘Now "the critique of the subject" gives various philosophical reasons that tend to withdraw our right to seriously attribute an action to someone.
The shattered homunculus? There is one argument that might prevent the subject disappearing into a history of practices. Mind is not just a ghost in the machine. the criminals and the ‘good boys’. with an identity (analogous to personal identity) (1991: 125). reflective structure of the ego through the subject’s acceptance of its position within the order of symbolic exchange’ (Dews 1995: 24). So ‘the true thinking subject (or that – the "non-subject" – which thinks) must therefore be inhuman’ (Descombes 1991: 126). the sick and the healthy. Now we come to the crunch. because otherwise there is no way to distinguish the contingent human traits from the philosophical thinking subject. human beings are made subjects. retrospectively at least. split Lacanian or self-supposing form.. They are in fact assigned. a being endowed with a temporal continuity (comparable to the physical continuity of a material thing).

and a unitary telos however necessarily unachievable – au recherche du temps perdu. completely indifferent. The Sāmkhya conceptualization of the tripartite process appears to intend precisely the opposite. cannot know or intuit itself.. the agent of interest being the unconscious (1995: 35-37).
. utterly isolated. The Symbolic is closely linked to language that is treated in ancient structuralist fashion as a system.. verbally uncharacterizable..and potentially present in the awareness of all intellects as not being that awareness (Larson 1987: 80-81). it. a mental object.The subject of ‘the subject’
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big Other by the failure of this representation’ (Zizek 1989: 208). nonintentional presence incapable of performing any activity. and though Freud grants it the status of an agency (Instanz).. This self or ego is thus. Other ideas about the subject Descombes’s argument had been reached many centuries earlier by Indian Sāmkhya philosophers. cf. in Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis the ego is clearly not an active agent.’ As Fink. therefore. a Lacanian analyst. following Volosinov. the real.is really substance (1987: 71)... outside space and time. finally. Lacan’s work centres around the themes of identity.. If. completely inactive. Urwin 1984). displacement of. In less-than-skilful hands.
As we are going to invite thinkers sympathetic to Lacan. who had concluded that the subject could only exist as
a contentless. fantasy (the Imaginary) and the deferral. we get a quite different vision of the unconscious (which famously ‘is structured like a language’.. A few comments are in order though. a construct. Where Lacan agrees with Descombes and the Sāmkhya philosophers is that ‘the subject is never more than supposed. the Lacanian subject veers on becoming a shattered homunculus desperately trying to glue the bits together again: the fairy tale of Humpty Dumpty..the presupposition for all apparent discrimination or differentiation. neither an object nor a subject (in any conventional sense). which dissociates it as inherently linked to any sovereign consciousness or body. it would be inappropriate to anticipate what they have to say. as Eastern philosophy has been telling us for millenia. Note the parallels with Hegel’s being which contains its own contradiction. It is nostalgia for a notionally unitary source. It is outside the realm of causality.. representation (the Symbolic). it is merely those utterances which have been made. substance is subject. put it: the subject is
neither the individual nor what we might call the conscious subject (or the consciously thinking subject). a pure witness whose only relation to primordial materiality is sheer presence. For Sāmkhya the apparent subject.
Larson adds
It has been said that the intention of Hegelian philosophy is to show that. and impossibility of confronting.

Stivale. B. Seduction. and its resultant phenomenal appearance in the empirical world of experience or its objectification. M. Borch-Jacobsen. of New York Press. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Albany. Bibliography Bakhtin. Buber. from politics to ethics. P. Prolegomena to any post-deconstructive subjectivity. Foss. society. trans. . Appendix 2.N. Singer. In Jean Baudrillard: selected writings. New York: Semiotext(e). C.The subject of ‘the subject’
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Mind. Baudrillard. in Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. S. as action in the world. . G. Dews. 1983a. The material process is tripartite and consists of energy that is capable of spontaneous activity (rajas).1988 [1985]. ed. In Deconstructing subjectivities. Beitchman. The idea of nature. S. R. M. The logic of sense. The masses: the implosion of the social in the media. while what is material is caught in unending process. Toward a reworking of the Dostoevsky book. London: Athlone.M. Patton & J. New York: Semiotext(e). 1984.
. London: Univ.G. Emerson. Poster. E. eds. The implosion of meaning in the media. and determinate formulation or objectification (tamas). P. In The shadow of the silent majorities. 1996. ed. . Connor & J-L. . & intro. These are therefore as much moments in the transformation of all instantiated being as distinct processes. Nancy. Boucher. Johnston. London: Routledge. In Who comes after the subject? eds.1990. This endless process of constituting. NY: State Univ. Deleuze. Martin’s Press. M. Patton & P. M.1945. New York: St. ed. M. trans. P. Minneapolis: Univ. Sāmkhya philosophers anticipated Lacan. J. The Freudian subject. trans. 1990. On intersubjectivity and cultural creativity. The new Leviathan or man. Foss. Critchley & P.. subjective and objective. cannot finally transcend its conditions of existence without ceasing to be material in whatever sense. bringing it about through causation or intention (Descombes’s ‘performative attribution’). ed. P. but objectification cannot be opposed to some more desirable state (subjectification). P. Revised edn.. M.1983b. of Chicago Press. Eisenstadt. Lester & C. trans. Oxford: Polity. Critchley. Collingwood.. In other words.or the end of the social and other essays.. they are about constituting or creating something. Where this leaves the subject of the subject in Asian and African media is a moot point. which continue unceasingly. & trans. bringing about and objectifying. 1992. There no dichotomy between mind and body. Maclean. Simulations. Cadava. S. the last leading to a new process of constituting is reminiscent of Peirce’s triadic process of signification. trans. D. Oxford: Clarendon Press. civilization and barbarism. 1942 [1992]. 1991. of Minnesota Press. rational ordering (sattva).